The Singing of Swans tells the story of Madalene
Ross, a thirty-year-old American who "lives in her head," cut off from her body, her heart, and her sense of
purpose in the world. En route to and from her job as a computer programmer in Minneapolis, Madalene is
hounded on the downtown streets by a homeless woman who asks "Got a match?" At night bizarre dreams haunt her
sleep. Women fly through rooftops, chant in ancient temples, paint tongues of fire on vivid white
canvases.

Madalene's story is interwoven with the lives of three women: Rosalina, a priestess of Persephone in 70 B.C.E.
Sicily; Ziza, a strega (Italian witch) in 16th century northeastern Italy, and Ibla, an herbalist and
painter in 18th century southern Italy. Sicily's Lake Pergusa and the Black Madonna also act as a portal to the
rich tradition of pre-Christian spirituality that lies beneath Church dogma.

The Singing of Swans takes readers on a multi-century journey to uncover
long-silenced traditions, crack Madalene's spiritual code and reclaim her soul. Elements of magical realism
dovetail with historical storytelling as this compelling tale of redemption unfolds.

Reviews of The Singing of
Swans

SageWoman: Celebrating the Goddess in Every Womanreview ofThe Singing of Swans

MatriFocus Cross-Quarterly
for the Goddess Womanreview of The Singing of
Swans

“The Roman poet Ovid sang of the
beautiful Sicilian lake where Persephone descended to the otherworld—a lake now dying from overdevelopment. No
siren’s song could be more commanding than this novel centered on that magical lake. Generations of women of the
streghe tradition—call them pagans, call them witches—join their voices in this tightly wrought magical
chorus.”

Patricia Monaghanauthor of The Goddess
PathThe Red-Haired Girl from the Bog

"The Singing of Swans is more
than a novel. It combines an immense amount of learning, a great novelist’s ability to weave the present, the past,
the far past, and the future into a spell-binding story…and to transmute all this into an offer of life to all of
us trapped in contemporary deadening cultures.

“In Sicily, an island that may be a metaphor for anywhere, Mary and I have both been
overcome by the feeling that a terrible violence was done to women, a wound that continues to throb in our bodies.
Because she is a highly gifted writer, Mary can lift this experience into an historically accurate, and searing,
account of church and state persecution of good women—herbalists, healers, midwives called witches.

“This novel may give you the courage to quit your dead-end job, book a flight to
Italy, and, like Madalene, ‘exhilarated by the possibilities,’ howl ‘at the brilliant blue Sicilian
sky.”